EVALUATION & DOCUMENTATION

Students participate in RiverWays, a collaborative environmental stewardship pilot program for Philadelphia youth.

We develop evaluation frameworks and tools to document and assess program outcomes, align organizational strategies with community needs, and strengthen participation.

We design data collection strategies to learn whether programs are reaching their potential and what might improve them.

We provide recommendations based on data collection with participants — the people who create, administer, and use the programs.

We create learning communities to deepen shared knowledge and facilitate organizational development.

For example, we provide:

  • We center these methods to both recognize and correct policies and practices that disenfranchise groups and individuals.

  • We provide assessment assistance at every stage of a program, from concept to post-project reflection.

  • We possess thorough understanding of regional and international human rights protocols that often guide program implementation and provide a framework to assess efficacy.

  • We review relevant reports, data sets, publications, programs and participant input to contextualize program goals and understand “best practices” to achieve change.

  • Together, monitoring, evaluation and learning provide robust information to determine how, if, and when programs succeed and what we need to learn to sustain efficacy.

  • We utilize methods that challenge traditional evaluation protocols to bring myriad voices, experiences, and expertise into decision and policy-making arenas.

  • We develop and administer tools to gather participant feedback including surveys, interviews and focus groups, and assist organizations to make sense of the data collected.

  • Technical assistance ranges from helping an organization develop data collection tools to training internal staff to track assessment metrics.

  • A Theory of Change is a tool that assists an organization to identify goals, articulate values, and plan action steps.

EXAMPLES OF OUR EVALUATION WORK

  • CREATIVE PHILADELPHIA: Healing Verse Germantown

    We are collaborating to document the impacts of Healing Verse Germantown (2024-2026), a temporary poetry and public art project supported by the City of Philadelphia and a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge grant. HVG ignites a powerful dialogue on the streets of Philadelphia, transforming the voices of those touched by gun violence into healing works of poetry and public art. (Photo courtesy of Steven CW Taylor)

  • ARTisPHL: PHILLY ARTISTS CONNECTING COMMUNITIES

    Along with fellow evaluator Susannah Laramee Kidd, Beth evaluated the first two rounds of ARTisPHL an innovative public art grant program that activates public space in Philadelphia through artist-led and community-focused temporary public art installations and performances. Through data collection with grant recipients, we developed recommendations and action items to improve outcomes and increase equity.

  • PENNSYLVANIA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY: Love Where You Live

    Beth is collaborating with Susannah Laramee Kidd to co-lead and design a community participatory evaluation strategy with Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to measure the impacts of Love Where You Live, a three-year (2023-2025) greening program for the Nicetown and Tioga neighborhoods of Philadelphia.  This “green vision” plan emerged from an in-depth collaboration between community members and leaders and established neighborhood health and wellness priorities including increasing access to fresh food and restoring the tree canopy.  We are piloting a new place-based model that focuses on long-term, neighborhood-driven transformation. 

  • PENNSYLVANIA HUMANITIES COUNCIL: Rain Poetry

    Beth is working alongside Pennsylvania Humanities Council (2023-2025) to co-activate a learning process with participants of Rain Poetry. Activated in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Reading, Rain Poetry is a literacy arts education project that celebrates and shares the poetry of young people through haiku workshops and rain-activated public poetry installations. Utilizing culturally responsive and participatory methods, we are capturing how students learn the techniques of haiku and develop literacy skills to tell their own stories. With this data, we are creating a project toolkit to advance public humanities outcomes.

  • STENTON MUSEUM: Inequality in Bronze

    Inequality in Bronze was a two-year public history project at Stenton Historic House in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, the former plantation home of James Logan. Funded by Pew Center for Arts & Culture, this project used community storytelling in the process of creating a new memorial to Dinah, a woman who was enslaved and lived at the site in the 1800s.

    As project evaluator, Beth collaborated with residents, Stenton staff and external partners including project curator Neysa Page-Lieberman and community dialogue facilitator Dina Bailey to create data collection tools to guide the artist selection process. Through a rigorous process that prioritized local residents, Germantown artist Karyn Olivier was selected to create a new site-specific monument on the property.

  • CHESTER MADE: Most Significant Change

    Chester Made, supported by Pennsylvania Humanities Council, promotes arts, culture and history in Chester, PA as a force for community revitalization. We collaborated with Creative Research & Evaluation to use storytelling and reflective feedback processes to refine an engagement framework for the project that centers long term sustainability, artistic expression, historical reclamation and economic viability.

  • THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE: DEAI

    We collaborated with the Research & Evaluation team at TFI to evaluate the museum’s existing audience and community engagement strategies in accordance with industry standards for diversity, equity, access and inclusion. The goal of this project was to produce guidelines and a plan of action for future efforts to strategically support DEAI efforts in line with the institute’s broader goals of science education.

  • RIVERWAYS: Multi-modal, Poly-vocal

    We worked with RiverWays, a consortium of environmental organizations in Philadelphia (Bartram’s Garden, Independence Seaport Museum, Glen Foerd, Wooden Boat Factory) to evaluate their shared summer environmental stewardship program. We used photo diaries, peer interviews, ‘on the water’ observations, river tours, focus groups and surveys to assess educational benchmarks while prioritizing positive youth development through the voices of teen-aged participants.